Маниакальный веблог

Since launching my categorization tool Shoppy I've had some fun analyzing collected data which resulted in considerable complication of the prediction model. And now I feel the urge to write a deeper dive into its inner workings. I'm not sure how useful it would be for anyone who isn't a part of the Grocery Categorization industry, but hopefully some NLP tricks could be at least interesting to any general practitioner.

Please note that I'm by no means an NLP expert! Part of the reason for writing this kind of posts is to try and nerd-snipe someone who knows more into sharing their expertise.

Oh, and it's not a short one, this! Settle down :-)

Meet Shoppy! It's a helper app for my recently revived shopping list, with which I'm hoping to grow the dataset for categories prediction. In fact, even early beta tests have made Shoppy significantly more savvy about alcoholic drinks (the initial data comes from my own shopping, and my entire family happens to be non-drinkers). See if you can confuse it about something it doesn't know!

But besides that, there's a few deeper philosophical and technical notes I wanted to share.

Last Friday I spotted Dave Gauer's post about using a text editor as a UI which hit some of my sweet spots about computers. One of the examples mentioned in it was crontab -e which opens a cron config file in a text editor. And not only it spares you remembering the location of the config, but it also offers a guiding commented example if the config is missing, and helpfully signals cron to pick up the changes after you finish editing.

And almost immediately I thought about my own tool that could use something like this: nfp.

Amazingly enough, not only had I actually opened the project and started fiddling around, I continued doing it through the weekend, and by the end of day on Sunday actually finished the feature! And despite it being a rather small one, as they go, I have to add that I was coding all through watching snooker matches, cooking food, chauffeuring my family on errands and dealing with some emergencies.

So I went to bed feeling quite happy with myself :-)

Is this platform still massively against AI or has it moved more towards acceptance?

— Armin Ronacher

If you leave a bad argument from a prominent person unchallenged, it starts looking like an accepted common wisdom. Armin Ronacher has enough clout, and his stated position sounds wrong enough to me to not let let it just slide. Here's my argument, for those who still values what I have to say. I'm not directing this directly at Armin, as the tone of his first message should tell you everything about his readiness to have his position challenged.

So what happened was, I have developed my shopping list to the point where it got useful to me, after which I lost interest in working on it. You know, the usual story… It was however causing me enough annoyances to still want to get back to it eventually. So a few weeks ago, after not having done any programming for a year, I finally broke through the dread of launching my IDE again and started on slowly fixing the accumulated bitrot. And through the last several days I was on a blast implementing some really useful stuff and feeling the familiar thrill of being in the flow.

I'm a fan of a hypothesis about "mental capacity" being a finite quantity that you spend while actively using your brain and recover during rest. It may sound obvious, but history is full of many seemingly "obvious" truisms that were ultimately disproved by science (like geocentric planetary model or cold weather being the reason for common cold).

I don't know of any actual research into this hypothesis, but my life experience keeps providing me with confirmations.

The Dawn of Everything is a book by an archaeologist David Wengrow and an anthropologist David Graeber who methodically dismantle the simplified view of the progress of human civilization. That we went from small bands of hunters-gatherers to tribes, to agriculture, to cities, to empires and ended up with our current idea of nation states, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of societal development.

Today was my last day working at DataDog. Despite me having built and launched a pretty useful service within our department, the leadership decided to set it aside and built its next iteration with different people and different technologies. I resisted for a while :-), but wasn't really trying to save it at any cost: after all, nothing you do at work really belongs to you, so it's up to the company to decide what they want.

This story is about an accomplishment at work. Due to it being work-specific I won't go into too much detail, so it won't be necessarily useful. It's just a personal piece. For various reasons (such as changing places, raising a child, workplace politics, poor luck) I haven't got any clear wins under my belt for quite some time, probably since building a Python team at Yandex 15 years ago. So this one feels a little special.

A post about Haskell vs. Python readability came onto my radar the other day. It compares two implementations of a trie structure, and after looking upon the Python version I wanted to make my own attempt. I didn't make it to necessarily compare or "battle" against the other solutions, it's more of an exercise in the vein of "how would I do it".